The Oaks Environmental Plantation Project

The Oaks Environmental Plantation Project is a plantation forestry project located approximately 40km south-west of Casino in the Richmond Valley local government area of New South Wales. It was registered in April 2025 and covers 428.90 hectares.

Plantation forestry transition projects involve shifting a commercial plantation forest, which would otherwise be logged for timber, into a permanent planting. Standard requirements for this methodology include ceasing all commercial timber harvesting and permanently maintaining the forest canopy to sequester carbon long-term.

The Richmond Valley area is well known for agriculture, particularly cattle grazing, commercial forestry, and sugar cane production. The region is considered a high rainfall area with a subtropical climate, and the local soils consist mostly of fertile alluvials near the river systems and sodic soils across the broader plains.

This project sequesters carbon by transitioning the existing plantation into a permanent forest, explicitly protecting it in a situation where the land was at risk of being completely cleared and converted back to non-forested land, such as for grazing. As an interesting additional detail, the project proponent, Saul Clough, works as a Business Development Manager for GreenCollar, one of Australia's leading environmental market project developers.